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30 November, 2013

There is a great deal bandied about these days concerning the duty to serve.

Currently, the Tory Government is considering a new Law to jail people in the caring services, who “wilfully neglect” any patients in their care.

It is, of course, a major attempt to blame the servers for a quite evident decline in the quality of services during this particularly parlous current state of Capitalism, and, of course, the cuts meant to remedy the situation. You would think from the rhetoric that they, the Tories, are doing all they can to “serve” the community, but are being traitorously let down by the “soon-to-be-criminal” actions of our professional carers.

But surely, we have to ask, “In considering the provision of services to the mass of the people in general, we need to define who is best equipped to provide them, and why?”

Of course, to answer this we must first ask, “Can a service be provided effectively on the basis of delivering that service having to generate a worthwhile profit?"

Note: A profit is not wages! Over and above the payment of wages to those delivering the service, there is an added margin, paid to the owners of the facilities, which is The Profit!

The proponents of the Capitalist System do not only insist that it can, but they actually also say that it is the only effective way of doing it. Are they right?

The crucial imperative in a capitalist system is that it is financed by people with large financial resources, who will invest the necessary wherewithall to allow businesses to be set up to provide various services, but only if they get both a regular dividend on their investment, and in addition can sell that investment for a different kind of profit too.

Clearly, the motivations of these crucial investors are by no means a philanthropic desire to “serve” society. It is a group of people who already possess quite considerable resources, but who ideally want those to provide a substantial income, without reducing their extractable initial investment, and without them having to actually do anything, apart from observing their investment carefully to ensure its profitability.

They are scarcely imbued with ”service to the community”!

They may interpret a current excitement or concern in the population as likely to produce a sufficient demand to allow investments in those areas to deliver what they are exclusively interested in – unearned income in as large amounts as possible, while still maintaining the value of their original investment for return when they think fit.

Some time ago I decided to look into the question as to how these people came to have such large disposable wealth, that they could then invest in the capitalist way. And it turned out that the main way had always been Theft! My researches turned into a rather long paper on the SHAPE Blog entitled Primitive Accumulation, and it was to become the most accessed SHAPE paper in the last five years.

Not one single capitalist accumulated their wealth by either saving earned wages, or by just making things and selling them. It always was, and still is, impossible to accumulate the vast sums involved by such means.

And, there is another kind of stealing, which is regarded as entirely legal.

It is acquiring what you know to be valuable, from people who are unaware of that value, by paying ridiculously low amounts to the owners, and then selling what you have acquired at something like its true value.

[Unsurprisingly, when negotiating to buy such things, they still force down the price as far as they can. Is that not stealing? Yet, it is not only regarded as entirely legal, but also both very clever and meritorious. So, “dishonest trading“ is a very good method too!]

“Conning the ignorant” is generally considered to be “good business”, and when coupled with bribes and “transactions of mutual benefit”, can also fleece public organisations in the very same way.

So, quite apart from explaining where investable capital was acquired, this investigation also demonstrated how very inappropriate such people are to provide services for the general population. They couldn’t be more in appropriate!

And, of course, to do it without a problem, you have to cultivate an extremely low opinion of the people you are conning. So these “dealers” are scarcely the group of people likely to conscientiously serve the community, are they?

Indeed, they also can have zero grasp of what services should be, and how much they should cost ordinary people. That is never really a major consideration, “For these are the people we con everyday for our wealth and status. Our only really important consideration must be how lucrative will an investment in such an undertaking be!”

Not quite the same is it?

They will be concerned... but it will be, “How can we organise it so that the return on our investment is satisfactory – that is – will it be big enough!”

No! No! No! No! No!

You can never trust such people to provide a Service!

They may deliver something passable to initially secure the deal, but as soon as possible it will be modified with the only important principle taking over “How do we milk this for maximum profit?”

Now, you may well wonder how they get away with it, but once such a division of society has been established, with all the wealth and influence on one side, and everyone else on the other, how can things be changed? Well, initially they certainly couldn’t! No one had the wherewithall to counter the power of the wealthy. For they not only owned the businesses, but also the means of disseminating the News.

They quickly gained owning-possession of the newspapers, and then later, the Radio stations and even the Television stations too, so the public were only told what the owners wanted them to be told.

Making a difference seemed impossible!

But, who actually produced everything? Surely, that was what ordinary people did for a wage? And, if they didn’t produce, the owners would find themselves in dire straights. Investors would sell their shares in the affected company, and the value of the company and of the investments within it would plummet!

So, workers slowly began to build defensive organisations to counter the power of the rich. They first built Unions and then political parties.

How do you think the Labour Party got its name?

By acting together, pooling their meagre resources, but most of all by using the power of the Strike!

They could withdraw their labour – refuse to work, and stop anyone else from stepping in and doing their jobs. The picketed Strike was born and was breathtakingly effective!

Yet, how would these same people be in service jobs?

They were certainly fully aware of the vast majority of the people they would have to serve. Before the Welfare State they did ALL the Service of ordinary people, and they did it for nothing!

In my street I had half a dozen “Mams” (or “Aunties” as they were called). If any family had some sort of calamity, people were round immediately asking what they could do.

Do you even have to ask who make the very best people in service jobs?

It is surely obvious.

And these are the very same people who went on Strike, who put out fires, and protected us from the criminal classes (who were NOT workers, by the way, but the lower end of the owning class, who were still accumulating in the original way by straight theft)

Indeed, perhaps the reason for the title of this paper is becoming clear. For, in providing an appropriate service, you have to fully appreciate what service should involve, when thinking about those being served. While being ready to strike when defending yourself against those who are usually in charge of such provision.

Yet, the Tories love to contrast these as incompatible opposites – claiming that workers strike because they ignore the service requirements that will be lost by such actions. But, of course, the real ignorers of those needing to be served are those who only see them as a means of making ever-larger profits.

12 November, 2013

On reading about a new experiment, carried out by a team at Chalmers University, concerning the “contents of Empty Space”, I expected to get more evidence for my own speculations upon the very same subject, but instead ended up with many more questions than answers.

We were informed that Empty Space – the complete and total vacuum, is not empty, but teeming with many different particles popping-in-and-out of existence, both into and from, “something”. Clearly, that “something” is important, but in this account the narrative slips from talking about virtual particles to virtual photons (as if they are the same thing). Now, the reasons for these “names” is that they are constantly appearing and disappearing as their “actual mode of existence” so the observers involved prefer to call them virtual.

But clearly, what they are when they are not virtual particles is important. And similarly, what they are when they are not virtual photons is important too!

One assumes that, in spite of their switch in appellation, they are talking about the same things – that is “virtual particles” and “virtual photons” are the two forms in an oscillation, which is either one between visible and invisible modes, or a “substrate” sensitive to the slightest variation in available energy. Either way, we can no longer stay with the total emptiness idea, but will have to explain the nature and causes of such a substrate and its seemingly constant variability.

This seems to be borne out by the identification of the real photons that are the final result of the experiment, as being recognised as such by their lacking of any perceivable mass.

Let us attempt to clarify what they are talking about, before we address their remarkable experiment.

The “known” oscillating in and out of existence of these particle/photons is seen as something very different from Pair Production and Pair Annihilation in high energy Accelerators, where a pair of actual particles – an electron and a positron are seemingly produced from a very high energy photon, and its opposite – the vanishing of an electron and a positron into a high energy photon. The difference with the phenomenon, being considered at Chalmers, is what appears seems to be a pair of photons, which immediately vanish again.

The vagueness in this published account seems to call these entities sometimes virtual photons and sometimes virtual particles, but their experimental apparatus seems to involve a way of interfering with this oscillation to result in the production of a pair of real photons.

NOTE: I can only assume that they only add the adjective “virtual” as they are shame-faced about the conversions to and from matter that would be involved with actual photons and particles.

The only way this writer has been able to make sense of similar phenomena (elsewhere) has been to consider a mutually-orbiting pair, consisting of one electron and one positron. The virtue of this union is twofold.

First, it will have no net electrical charge – the positive charge of the positron will cancel out with the negative charge of the electron.

And second, it will have no apparent matter as equal amounts of matter and antimatter will again cancel each other out.

In addition, such an “invisible” particle will be able to hold a quantum of energy via the promotion of the mutual orbits, and easily pass that energy from one such particle to another.

This joint particle – the positronium or neutritron, becomes an invisible receptacle for a quantum of electromagnetic energy – and when in such a state becomes a Photon!

Now, whether this particular hypothesis is correct or not, isn’t the most important thing here. What is surely crucial is the possibility of something like such particles actually existing!

And as the positronium has indeed been observed at Fermilab (though of infinitesimal duration in such conditions) that certainly adds weight to the idea that a stable form could indeed be possible.

As soon as such particles are brought into situations such as Pair Production and Pair Annihilation, (and maybe even these new phenomena - usually called the Dynamic Casimir Effect, the “seeming magic” dissolves away, and we instead have the possibility of real explanations for the inexplicable anomalies.

The bringing in of such kinds of particles as the actual content of Empty Space, finally explained the anomalous Double Slit Experiments without difficulty.

The crucial concept was to treat Empty Space as non-empty, and consisting of a “Paving” or “substrate” of just such particles. As soon as such a substrate was included, the puzzling phenomena of these experiments were explicable.

Now clearly, there are still many questions about such a suggestion, for though it can explain certain phenomena, it still does not make it true. And, to cope with the establishment of electrostatic and magnetic fields in a similar kind of substrate, it demanded other, different particles to be involved, though the final explanation was the best yet.

To have such a substrate or paving, the components of it must be relatively unaffected by both Gravity and electrostatic charges, and hence how they got to be universally present literally everywhere has to be explained. And, how they inter-related with one another to deliver an actually” effecting” paving will require explanation too

Now, it is also interesting how both the Chalmers Experiment and Yves Couder’s remarkable experiment managed to get their produced phenomena by the inclusion of an imposed vibration. In Couder’s case it was of a liquid silicone substrate in a tray, upon which all the phenomena occurred. While a Chalmers it was their vibrating mirror”.

Clearly, in both cases, it was these vibrations that imported the necessary kind and amount of energy to bring about the given phenomena.

While, in this theorist’s Theory of the Double Slit, the only possible source for what was happening in these experiments (and in subsequent successful efforts to explain the energy embodied in electrostatic fields), always ended up with it coming from the substrate and NOT from the supposedly causing Charge.

If these inferences can be taken together, we can see Empty Space as not only non-empty, but also a system of receptacles for energy – a system, maybe undetectable, but capable of remarkable things – Action-at-a-Distance, Energetic Fields and even the Propagation of electrostatic energy across the Universe.

The amazing diversity of modern cosmological theories reveal the almost infinite variety possible when Reality is replaced by Ideality as the stage for all phenomena.

In New Scientist (2935), a short article by Lisa Grossman, entitled Cosmic Baby Snaps at Bubbly Birth, various theorists construct their contributions to “explain” unevenness in the current Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB), which they attempt to encapsulate into purely formal patterns alone. And, with that, we immediately leave the restricting confines of concrete Reality for the unlimited expanses of the purely Formal – that is the place where the “essences of everything”, that always deliver entirely alone today’s “explanations”, actually solely dwell – the World of Pure Forms alone that we call Ideality!

With every discovery, today’s scientists immediately put chalk-to-blackboard and find-a-form that will fit the newly obtained data.

It is the current method of explaining things by form alone, and it delivers Absolute Truths rather than old-fashioned, explanatory hypotheses, for in Ideality all forms are absolute, that is its strength (and, of course, also its weakness).

There is, of course, a seemingly physical language that is always used, with apparently physical forces, entities and their properties, but they are all secondary embellishments to the real nitty-gritty – the primary Forms involved, which actually drive Reality!

Let us relate just a few tasty morsels made available by such methods, as outlined in Lisa Grossman’s account! There is, before everything else, a Metaverse (prior to our and all other Universes), in which bubbles arise (like air-bubbles in a boiling liquid), each of which will then become a new Universe. BUT, wait for it, the densities of these universes (remember they are bubble-shaped) will be less than that of the producing Metaverse, so .the fabric of spacetime within them will inevitably be saddle-shaped.

Have you got that?

NO? Well, never mind, if you are a modern physicist, you will stop worrying as soon as a form-that-fits is put into your hands (or even one you have put together for yourself).

Oh, by the way, do not consider what will happen if the bubbles collide, for you would get absolutely nothing from such an event. The bubbles will all be expanding at the Speed of Light, so nothing from that boundary could possibly get back to anyone within that Universe, and, if it could, it would get “all mixed up” with the Big Bang data, and would be impossible to disentangle.

07 November, 2013

When watching discussions on the television, and being told that “both sides of the argument” have been adequately covered, I cannot help getting very angry indeed.

For that is absolutely never the case!

For the problem supposedly “being addressed” is always, yes absolutely always, diverted into some area of prejudice, or alternatively some dishonest, supposedly moral imperative, which means, and is intended to assure, that those who need to be adequately informed are being misled to a significant and deliberate extent. The real issues are never addressed!

Indeed, when some millionaire starts talking about charity, public spiritedness, and concern for the future of our country, he is clearly lying!

Why? It is because he is not one of us: he is a TORY.

Do you think he earned his millions? Of course he didn’t! You earned them for him!

All their wealth was created by ordinary people, going to work every day, but never getting the real value of their contributions. That almost always goes to the owners! And when the profits aren’t flowing as they would like, they will sack “unproductive workers” wholesale, and then denounce them for lazily living off the State!

And when some scapegoat is selected to hive off (via totally proved misdemeanours) the antagonism of the people. These denizens of the public-good denounce their erstwhile colleagues for ”overstepping the mark”, “mis-selling", or “not giving sufficient information”.

Now these sound more like hapless errors than what they really are, for not only were they doing what they did on purpose, but also the very denouncers do exactly the same sort of things all the time. They are just much better at hiding it all, AND, crucially, not getting caught!

You must have noticed how comfortably even these proved sinners “land upon their feet”, and not only get well-paid sinecures somewhere or other, but remain as part of the same milieu – the Owners Of The Country!

Even the description “for the benefit of the country” doesn’t mean for the majority of the population, it means for Capitalism, and for “WE” (meaning the Tories) that run this show, and make our fortunes.

They "believe" that without their own increasing wealth, there would be no crumbs from their tables to sustain the proletariat (or “Plebs” as they are sometimes called!)

Literally nowhere in the Mass Media is there a contrary view.

And, all newspapers, from Local to National, are pro-capitalist. The very best that you can expect is a liberal, or moralist criticism of behaviours, but never a tirade against the Economic System that rewards such dishonesty!

All TV stations are also pro-capitalist, and, of course, owned by millionaires.

Such an imbalance of literally many thousands to one, in delivering so-called News, means that the public is massively and purposefully misinformed.

And, newspapers like the SUN pander to racism and prejudice, while doing what they can to make even more money out of peddling both “naked ladies” and lies - all for he benefit of their men in politics, and behind them, the owners of this country. Have you not noticed the clone-like nature of all the UK's political leaders - Cameron, Osborne, Clegg and even Milliband? And they are all very similar concoctions, are they not? And, they are each and every one PRO-CAPITALIST!

Interestingly, it was a Labour Government, which helped to rescue Capitalism in 2008. Yet the Tories talk about that as typical of Labour’s waste of National Resources. Yet, if Brown and Co. had not persuaded world leaders to do likewise, then Capitalism would have been finished.

I feel that every News Programme should have another superimposed commentator (as they do for the deaf), but this one representing the rest of us – constantly pointing out, “But, he’s a TORY, He doesn’t give a damn for ordinary working people, He is lying, as usual", and other such valuable additions.

About Me

I am a retired lecturer and full-time writer. As the truth of Science has been my major concern throughout my life, I cannot conceive of teaching it in an uncritical, passive way. It's truth or error is THE question, and its improvement must be my main purpose. Teaching for me is Philosophy, and that means taking a stand on all sorts of issues, not sitting on the fence!